Curveball (15 page)

Toni knew she would be in for a period of adjustment with the Creoles. She had enough experience being both a newcomer and the only woman on a team to understand that the other players would be testing her athletic skills. But the Creoles also would wonder about her spine. Playing on a Southern team was quite different from playing against a Southern team, they said. There would be the chicken wire, the jeers, the Jim Crow buckets of drinking water in the dugouts labeled “whites” and “colored.” Now that Toni was a Creole and playing most of her games in the South, she had to steel herself against daily humiliations. She quickly learned what her teammates meant during a game in Florence, Alabama. An old white man “who practically owned the town,” Toni said, was sitting near her and the players’ bench. “Come on, nigger gal, hit that ball,” he yelled, thinking he was offering encouragement. After the game, the man’s mortified son searched for Toni to apologize. When he found her, Toni listened and accepted his apology, but lied about being within earshot of the insult. “I told him I didn’t hear the remark,” Toni said.
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Sometimes deception—even lying to herself—served as an anesthetic against pain. Toni had good reasons to be cautious in her response. That spring the Klan promised trouble when Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers toured the South. Branch Rickey signed deals for the Dodgers to play a series of preseason games with local white teams as Robinson and his teammates traveled from their spring training site in Florida to New York. Record-setting crowds in Miami, Florida, and Macon, Georgia, warmly greeted the Dodgers, but the Klan protested a game against a white team, the Atlanta Crackers.
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The owner of the Crackers knew integrated games were against local law and sought a municipal “approbation” that allowed Robinson, Roy “Campy” Campanella, and Don Newcombe to play on the same field with whites.
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Dr. Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was incensed and implied that Robinson and other black players might be at risk on the field. “You can bet your life I’ll look up segregation law and investigate thoroughly,” Green said. “In my opinion, it’s illegal.” Robinson confronted Green’s attack during his Friday night radio program on WMCA in New York. “I will play baseball where my employer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, wants me to play,” he stated. Rickey’s ire was piqued. “Nobody anywhere and at any time can tell me what players we can use,” he said. “This is a decision I leave entirely to my manager, Burt Shotton.” The Klan vowed to petition the Fulton County solicitor general and hoped that Governor Herman Talmadge, “busy pushing through anti-Negro legislation,” would support them.
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Robinson’s wit also helped ease the tension. “We expect that we’ll run into a lot of name calling down there. I hope that’s all—but you never can tell. I know one thing; there’ll be plenty of colored people at those games. If anything starts to happen, Campy and I are going to make a bee-line for the middle of them and stay there.”
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When the day finally arrived for the game, nearly eighteen thousand fans crowded the stands at Ponce de Leon Park. Writing in the
Sporting News,
Joe B. King observed that so many black fans filled the “colored” sections that they pushed against “restraining ropes” around the outfield. Seeing the overflow crowds in Jim Crow seating, the Crackers’ president turned on the stadium public address system and announced that black fans would be permitted to sit in previously restricted areas. King described the rush for seats as a “mob action which even [filmmaker] Cecil B. DeMille could only dream.” Black fans ran from right field to open seats along the third base side. “There must have been a half-dozen unknown sprinters of Jesse Owens caliber leading the charge,” King wrote. “Many went down … from overeagerness [sic] to gain a position in the bleachers where no Negro had ever been permitted to sit.” Violence might have erupted at the moment black fans broke through the Jim Crow barrier, but King observed there was only laughter at what many white fans viewed as spectacle. Before the game began, the team president “thanked all the white fans as they fled from the bleachers to the grandstand.” He later acknowledged receiving only one complaint.
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King did not record the comments of black fans.

In 1949, even the name of Toni’s new team—the Creoles—sparked racial argument. Black citizens frequently quoted a line attributed to the late Governor Huey Long about the state’s distinct racial mixture. “You could feed all the ‘pure whites’ in Louisiana,” he was credited with saying, “with a nickel’s worth of red beans and a dime’s worth of rice.”
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Some residents believed that Creoles were “pure-blooded whites” who descended from French and Spanish settlers. Descendants of African slaves disagreed and said Creoles were mixed-race blacks who had French characteristics in name or culture. Still others said any resident who paid taxes in the state of Louisiana was Creole. “Honey, we’s all Creoles as far as I can see,” one anonymous black woman said. “We don’t ask what it is, we just be’s it…. Everything down here is Creole.”
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But even as part of the region’s distinctive mixture, blacks still faced threats. Just weeks before Toni joined the team in 1949, an attempted lynching and a case of police brutality rocked the region. In St. Landry Parish, west of Baton Rouge, a black rape suspect being held for trial was kidnapped by whites and almost lynched before he escaped into the Atchafalaya River.
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In Gretna, a town on the outskirts of New Orleans, a white policeman shot and killed a black man. The shooting was unwarranted and unprovoked, black residents said. At a meeting to demand an official police department response, a Dillard University professor stepped forward and warned the community that a government dominated by whites was not likely to change.
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The professor urged the assembled to put their faith in their own ability to organize and protest. “Such contempt will touch all persons who have no recourse in the body politic,” he warned.
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To blacks in the area, the two cases both demonstrated that racism went beyond how whites treated blacks. Racism also was built into the foundations of social structures all around them—government, law, education, and economics. The time had come to shift attention from individuals to institutions that disadvantaged blacks. While agreeing with the need to protest white domination, some black residents of New Orleans also argued that blacks sometimes contributed to their own subjugation. Nowhere was the talk about black complicity more heated than in arguments about Louis Armstrong and the uproar over the recent Mardi Gras parade. To many, the actions of Armstrong and the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club were silly, stupid, and demeaning. “Self-respect first,” one critic declared.
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For years, New Orleans native Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong dreamed of leading the Mardi Gras Zulu parade, but he never imagined his moment in the local spotlight would end in such controversy. Most blacks in the city were thrilled in 1949 when Armstrong finally was chosen to lead the city’s largest black parade. “For the first time in their thirty-three-year history, they had an internationally known famous person as their King,” observers said. “We like to think of Louis as a Babe Ruth of jazz!” On the day before the Zulu parade the New Orleans mayor, DeLesseps S. Morrison, presented Armstrong with a key to the city and teased the musician about saying his life’s dream had been fulfilled and he was ready to die. “Well, I just hope that the Lord won’t take me literally on that,” Armstrong joked back.
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The next morning at dawn, a barge carrying Armstrong as King of the Zulus slipped into the New Basin Canal. By 9:00 A.M. Armstrong was ready, decked out in his King of the Zulus regalia. Armstrong stood in a grass skirt over long black underwear. A red velvet cape draped his shoulders and a gold cardboard crown sat cockeyed on his head. His face was blackened, and large, white circles rimmed his eyes and lips, exaggerating his features into a stark racial caricature. Then the parade began, weaving its way down a twenty-mile route through the black neighborhoods of New Orleans. “Man, this is rich,” Armstrong said. “This king stuff is fine, real fine. It’s knocking me out.” Every few miles, Satchmo would stop the parade at a sponsoring tavern—“Zulus Will Stop Here!” signs said. While Armstrong entertained the crowds, his subjects drank beer and ate turkey and ham sandwiches, olives, and potato salad. Each tavern stop grew longer and each renewed start more boisterous and unsteady. As Armstrong’s float turned the final corner toward the main viewing stand, the crowd erupted into cheers. There was Louis Armstrong, King of the Zulus, swaying in blackface atop the wobbly confection of glitter, gaudiness, and palmetto leaves. Someone helped Satchmo down, and he entered the Gertrude Geddes Willis Funeral Home, where he offered a toast to his queen, Bernice Oxley, a ticket taker at the Ace Theatre. The rest of the parade bucked to an exhausted and dissipated end when—as was tradition—participants smashed and tore apart the King’s float, reducing Armstrong’s throne to a trash heap for souvenir hunters. At night, the celebration continued with parties all over the city.
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But Louis Armstrong and the Zulu blackface were not “hilarious” to everyone. Black intellectuals called them “offensive vestiges of the minstrel-show, Sambo-type Negro.” In fact, many of the city’s black residents believed the Zulu parade escalated racial prejudice and should be abolished. Days after Mardi Gras, the People’s Defense League denounced Armstrong for “contributing to one of the most disgraceful spectacles on Carnival Day.” The
Louisiana Weekly
condemned the Zulus, suggesting that Armstrong should not have used his fame for such a degrading and debased display. “The Zulu parade of 1949 was normal,” the newspaper wrote, “and that is awful by any standard. Louis Armstrong did nothing for it and it did less for him.”
Time
magazine noted that some supporters of the parade thought critics missed the point and failed to see the Zulu celebration as a “broad dark satire on the expensive white going-on in another part of town.”
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Nellie B. Lewis, who worked as a cashier in New Orleans, was typical of many blacks who thought that embracing racial caricatures in any form led to reinforced prejudice. “As whole, I enjoy Mardi Gras … [but] I dislike seeing the race participate in certain types of masking, imitating characters that they have never seen.”
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The protest over Louis Armstrong’s Zulu parade appearance sounded familiar to Toni. For years she had heard criticism about clowning performed by some black teams. Her old friend John Cotton from the Saint Paul Colored Giants thought it was fun to perform acrobatic ball tosses between innings, and fans laughed when players sitting in rocking chairs at the plate took wild, comical swings at the ball. Clowning in baseball went back even further than blackface at the Zulu parade. James Weldon Johnson, one of the writers the Saint Paul Hallie Q. staff members always praised, wrote about black “baseball comedies” that took place in the late nineteenth century. “Generally after a good play,” Johnson wrote in
Black Manhattan
, “the whole team would for a moment cut monkey shines that would make the grand stand and bleachers roar.” But when the Negro League was established in the 1920s, team owners wanted nothing to do with clowning. It was unprofessional, they said. Clowning teams were not taken seriously. But barnstormers and semi-pro teams such as the Florida Colored Hobos or Zulu Cannibal Giants thought clowning brought in crowds, and pointed out that their teams often made more money than conventional league squads. After white promoter Syd Pollock took over the Ethiopian Clowns in 1937, fans lined up to see Pollock’s brand of clowning. His players dressed in grass skirts or clown outfits; they wore whiteface and performed outlandish comedy routines. Player Dave Barnhill said, “We’d come to the park with paint on our faces like a clown. Even the bat boy had his face painted, too. We wore clowning wigs and the big old clown uniforms with ruffled collars. My clowning name was Impo.” The crowds loved it, Barnhill said, and the money was good. “They’d pay us extra money to do it over again, that’s how good it was.” Bob Bissant, who spent four years with the Zulu Cannibal Giants, remembered, “We’d have a dice game, steal bases the wrong way and cut up with the crowd. My specialty was to turn my butt to the pitcher and then jump out of the way and hit the ball.” Bissant, who later captained the New Orleans Black Pelicans in 1945, noted that clowning paid off in both money and better uniforms. “The uniforms were cooler than anything anybody else wore, and it was all a lot of fun to me. I was making $12 to $15 a day when back home I might be making $6 or $7 a week.”
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Comedy was at the center of black culture, proponents said. To forbid clowning on the baseball diamond would stifle an expression of the race.

But Cumberland Posey was sick of clowning and Syd Pollock. Posey owned the Negro League’s Homestead Grays and now penned an influential sports column for the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Clowning debased blacks and played into dangerous stereotypes, he argued. If that weren’t bad enough, using the arbitrary name “Ethiopian” for Pollock’s team ridiculed the African nation as well. Posey urged black sports editors to boycott coverage of the Ethiopian Clowns as a way to demonstrate their disgust. Pollock called Posey jealous because the Clowns made money. Arguments between Posey and Pollock continued to flair until the Negro League got involved in 1941 and ruled that all Negro League teams were forbidden from playing the Ethiopian Clowns. Playing on the same diamond with players cavorting in grass skirts and whiteface was a “detriment,” they said. Wendell Smith of the
Courier
agreed. Clowning was “the kind of nonsense which many white people like to believe is typical and characteristic of Negroes.” It was as damaging and demeaning as Amos ’n’ Andy, he said. A year later, Pollock and the league reached a compromise. Pollock’s team gave up the whiteface, the grass skirts, and the “Ethiopian” name, but they kept playing shadow ball and maintained comedy routines for pre-games, doubleheader breaks between games, and barnstorming. League owners were satisfied, and Pollock’s team, renamed simply the Clowns, was admitted into the Negro League.
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Posey and Smith no doubt kept their eyes on Pollock. One never knew what the white owner would have a black player do next.
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